


Vacuum Cleaner Salesman

by Vehemently



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-06
Updated: 2013-04-06
Packaged: 2017-12-07 15:51:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/750281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vehemently/pseuds/Vehemently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A glimpse of the ordinary past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vacuum Cleaner Salesman

The Marine lie stopped working suddenly, when he was six. Dean was in the dusty schoolyard, front tooth loose in its socket anyway, when Jimmy Lonsdale called him a liar and said that there weren't any Marines here. After that, Dean _had_ to fight, and when he'd made Jimmy cry (and knocked that tooth clean out), the teachers popped up and frog-marched him into The Office and he sat on the other side of the room from Jimmy listening to him go back and forth between sniveling and saying that his dad was a Army Major and would beat up Dean's dad.

(Dean could not remember what rank his dad had been, just that there were ribbons and salutes involved, but anyway unless Jimmy's dad was Andre the Giant, Dean was not worried about who could beat up who.)

So there was a Talking-To from the principal, who was short and round and balding and had a chart explaining about warm fuzzies and cold pricklies. Dean stared at the chart for a long time, transfixed by the drawings of nasty purple spiky creatures, before realizing that the principal's idea of a cold prickly was being called a twerp by a classmate, not literally the sensation of a cold spot in a room where somebody had died.

Jimmy went back to class and Dean went to the school nurse to make sure the bleeding had stopped and the tooth wasn't broken but had fallen out whole. It didn't seem like a big deal till his dad came and got him at the end of the day, because Dean was pretty proud of being trusted to walk home by himself and he didn't want to mess up Dad's plans. But Dad was in the car with that grim frown like something mean had gotten away, holding the baby in his lap so the teachers wouldn't look at him funny.

"They called me," Dad said, when Dean crawled into the front seat. He shrank a little against the warm leather, tried to make himself invisible. Sammy went down on the floor of the passenger footwell, where he'd be safer if Dad crashed the car and nobody would see him. Dean watched tiny fingers try to unpick his shoelaces while Dad put the car in gear and they got away. "You can't fight at school, Dean. People will ask questions."

"Duh, Dad," said Dean, forgetting that he was supposed to be invisible. "They already asked me questions. Jimmy called me a liar cause I said we moved here cause you're a Marine and you got transferred. What was I sposed to do?"

Dad chuckled, looked away as if he didn't want anybody to see he could laugh. "You fought a kid cause you lied and he called you a liar?"

There was no explaining logic to adults. "Yeah," Dean said, dumbfounded at Dad's innocence.

Dad said a very bad word to himself, low. Dean was only supposed to know the kinda bad words, so he pretended he had not heard that one.

"Liar liar on fire," came a voice from Dean's feet. Sammy was sing-songing to himself. Kid had nobody to talk to, now Dean was in school the full day, and Dad wasn't the funnest guy to play with. No wonder he was talking to himself.

"Guess we need to come up with better lies," said Dad, his forehead creasing the way it did when he brought home giant armfuls of thick, dusty library books.

"Guess so," said Dean. He shifted in his seat and decided not to tell Dad about losing the tooth. Other people believed in the tooth fairy, but not the Winchesters.

But Dad noticed the tooth at dinner anyway, and made a funny face and fished in his pockets for change. "Would the tooth fairy give Jimmy a quarter?"

"Um," said Dean, wondering if Dad was going to try to give him a dollar so he could tell Jimmy to shove it. "A quarter's plenty."

Dad passed over the quarter, a dulled old one. It said 1976 on the back, and had a special design. "Thanks, Dad." Dean tucked it into his pocket and got back to his Spaghetti-Os. Sammy banged his fork on his plate for no reason, splattering sauce.

Over the dishes that night, Dad washing and Dean drying and Sammy driving his matchbox car around on the floor between them, they came up with some better lies. Dean put his thinking cap on and invented some doozies, good enough to make Dad laugh out loud: _We're settlers from outer space. We're elves from Fairyland, just visiting. We ran away from a secret government facility._ (In quiet time at school, Dean had been working his way through  Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, which was pretty awesome, as books go.) _We're undercover cops. We're traveling salesmen -- we sell ghost insurance._

"The salesman one isn't bad," Dad said, and turned off the tap. He dried his hands on an edge of Dean's towel while he thought it over. "But you say I sell vacuum cleaners, okay? Or encyclopedias."

Encyclopedias was a huge and funny word. Dean flapped the towel at Sammy, calling, "bicyclepedia, bicyclepedia," and he got Dad to laugh again.

Sammy asked, "Popsicle?" with hope in his big dark eyes.

Dad swept him up off the floor. "Maybe in the morning, boy. Bedtime now." He lumbered into the bedroom and started the baby into the evening routine. Soon he would be packing up the duffel bag for night, and lock them in and head out hunting, and Dean would settle in for his one hour of television, knowing that his dad was making the bad guys pay.

He stood in the bedroom doorway, watching Sammy struggle his way into a clean t-shirt while Dad put the toothpaste on a baby-sized toothbrush. While everybody was occupied like that, Dean reached into his pocket and took out the 1976 quarter and put it down in the ashtray on top the television along with all the other loose change. Dad might need that quarter.

And anyway, other people believed in the tooth fairy, but not the Winchesters.


End file.
